Computers, particularly personal computers, have enjoyed, in recent years, an enormous growth in utility. Early computers allowed users to perform tasks such as word-processing and bookkeeping. Today, however, computers are being used also to manage, display, and manipulate multimedia data, such as digital video and audio. Additionally, computers have become everyday communications devices, nearly as common as telephones and televisions.
Much of this utility growth, especially for communications, stems from the fantastic, compounded growth of computer networks, such as the much heralded Internet.
The Internet, a worldwide network of computers interconnected through private wiring systems and public telephone systems, functions as a planetary communications system for sending and receiving information from one computer to one or more other computers. The information can take almost any form, including text, audio, and video information.
Communicating audio and video information between computers can be problematic in at least two ways. First, many conventional computers include software for handling audio and video information which can be inconvenient to use. For example, many conventional computers include Microsoft's DirectShow software—a system of interconnectable software modules (or filters)—which allows computers to capture multimedia data into data-storage devices, such as hard drives, and to playback, or render, the captured data through their audio-video equipment. Thus, a user having the DirectShow software can link her computer to a website or other computer featuring an audio-video clip, download (or copy) the clip into her local hard drive, and then play back the downloaded copy on her computer. Unfortunately, audio-video clips often include a great amount of data which, in some cases, requires several minutes to download, ultimately inconveniencing the user with a long wait. Accordingly, there is a need to extend software, such as Microsoft's DirectShow software, with features that allow concurrent download and playback, or streaming, of multimedia data.
Second, many conventional computers also include conferencing software, such as Microsoft's NetMeeting (version 2.1) software, which allows two or more computer users to communicate interactively across a computer network via audio-only or audio-video transmissions. A network conference typically requires that each party to the conference communicate using a common protocol not only for organizing and transmitting the audio and video data, but especially for encoding and decoding it. The common protocol ensures that each party to the conference ultimately understands what the other parties are communicating. Unfortunately, not all conferencing software uses the same protocol, frequently preventing users from network conferencing with users having different software. Accordingly, there is a need for network conferencing software that operates with more than one communications protocol.
In sum, there remains a need for a systems, methods and software which support streaming of multimedia data and multimedia conferencing via more than one communications protocol.